Monday, March 5, 2012

APR's top 25 regular season upsets: #23

Saints' season: finished 3-13. Head coach Jim Haslett was
fired after the end of the season.

Panthers' season: finished 11-5, clinched the #5 seed in
the NFC, and lost to the Seahawks in the NFC Championship game.

What happened: if you look
at the
stats for the Panthers' 2005 season, a couple things jump out:
1) 20 points scored was pretty low for them, and 2) 23 points
allowed was pretty high. But PFR's boxscore page doesn't reveal
much about why. Fortunately, nfl.com has the
gamebook
(pdf) on line, which reveals a lot more of what happened.

I see two major factors: first, the Saints really managed to
slow down the game—the Panthers only had 10 possessions,
including 3 that totalled 32 seconds of clock time. It's hard to
score points when you only have 7 real possessions to work with.

Second, the Saints managed to force 4 turnovers. This was one of
only two games that season where the Saints came out ahead on
turnovers. (The Saints finished 2005 with a league-worst -24
turnover margin, a big part of the reason they scored more than 21
points in just two games, and finished with a 3-13 record.) As has
often been observed, winning the turnover battle can make all the
difference between winning and losing, especially for a marginal
team.

Also of note: the Saints appear in this series 8 times,
twice as many as any other team (the Packers and Falcons are tied
for second place with 4 appearances each). The 49ers, Bears, Bills,
Ravens, and Seahawks are the only teams that don't appear on the
list (except, I guess, for this note).